Dave’s RV-7A Building Log

I riveted platenuts on all of the various covers for the fuel pump. There are about a dozen of them.

The next step was to fit the filter and pump to the base. As others have pointed out, one fitting on the pump needs to be turned in order to not interfere with the filter. That part wasn’t difficult, but I spent an hour wrangling with the tubing to get it to fit after moving the fitting. And it still wasn’t successful. I ended up crimping the tubing, so I’ll have to start over with a new piece. Frustrating.

I tried using the tubing bender. It works pretty good, but I can’t seem to get a nice smooth 180 degree bend. My bender only does 90 degrees and can’t seem to do two 90 degree bends right next to each other. Time to do some research on the net about tube bending.

Another weird thing is that after removing that tube, I noticed that one of the fittings on the pump was really loose. It’s a brass fitting that connects to a plastic part with an O-ring inside. The fitting was less than hand tight. I’m sure I didn’t loosen it, because I had a wrench on it when I was removing the tubing. I tightened up the fitting by hand and gave it another quarter turn with a wrench. I don’t want fuel leaking out of this thing in the future.

Of course I had to fire up the pump. I briefly touched the leads to a 12v drill battery that I have. I only ran it for a second, as the instructions say not to run it without fuel running through it–probably for cooling. The thing makes an awesome hum, and torques quite a bit when it starts up. Impressive.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 25th, 2005 at 10:00 pm and is filed under Cabin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.